Science Tools Working Group
We met yesterday; most likely we will not meet again until August 9. This report summarizes activities since June 22.
The current version of the Science Tools remains v7r3.
Data products: The door is not quite closed to comment on the proposed changes (cleaning up) of the FITS header for FT1. Regarding the keywords that relate to versions of software, one question I had was whether the tools can know their own version numbers.
Databases and related utilities
Tom reports that he is benchmarking various combinations of host, memory, and disks to plan the purchase of the systems that will host GLAST data at the GSSC. I did not think to ask about the scale and time scale. Even during year 1, the GSSC will be archiving L0 data.
Jean-Paul is visiting SLAC this week, and has been doing some work on the Astro Data Server. The persistent problem with the GTIs required reingesting the DC2 FT1 files - meaning loading a database table with the FT1 quantities that the Astro server allows searching on. The loading is fast, requiring about 1 hour for all 3.3 M events. I have not heard yet how long building the index takes, or rebuilding the index after incremental updates. Jean-Paul is willing to write a command-line interface to the Astro server, to allow queries by scripts. We'll meet together with Tony Johnson tomorrow afternoon.
Likelihood analysis
From Jim: "I added a class CountsSpectra to Likeihood to encapsulate the counts spectra information (observed and model counts as a function of energy) used by the plotting option in gtlikelihood and potentially by the Poisson counts "badness-of-fit" test [see below] being implemented by Analia and James."
"I tagged pyLikelihood at v0r3p1 so that the python interface that reads the gtlikelihood par files is now available."
Also Jim has taken advantage of st_graph improvements by James for log-log plots; with the plot option paramter set to 'yes' you get (counts spectral) plots of the model components and residuals. And he has implemented the capability for reading .par files in Python version of likelihood, binned and unbinned; as of 2 weeks ago the readline library was not quite working properly.
At the request of Dave Davis and Rita, output from gtlikelihood now inclues fluxes of model components in addition to counts; these are written both to ASCII and FITS binary files. Right now this is only for point source components - for diffuse components an integral, over the ROI say, and may not be interesting.
Analia and James are looking into providing some measure of whether the model you use in gtlikelihood is actually a good representation of the data. Conceptually this kind of makes sense, but it may be a morass in terms of implementation.
GRB tools
No news, although James reports that he and Dave Davis "began looking in detail at some issues Dave
uncovered when analyzing large numbers of photons using Xspec." I don't know right now what this specifically means, although 'issues' does not typically mean something like a wonderful surprise.
Pulsar tools
Masa and James are continuing to make the pulsar tools use the new TimeRep class. Goal still remains having versions to circulate by the end of the current build cycle (July 21).
Observation simulation
Jim now has gtobssim report numbers of events generated vs. numbers 'accepted' - this is now in the mc_src_id output file. The additional information was requested by Richard to help with understanding why PeriodicSource was behaving differently for gtobssim and Gleam. (First indication was that the DC2 X-ray binaries were factors of several fainter in the DC2 data than their definitions specified.) Toby traced the problem to an implicit assumption in PeriodicSource of 1-m 2 area for the 'target' vs. 6 m 2 for the Gleam runs. Jim has fixed PeriodicSource.
User interface and infrastructure
James delivered ape (the PIL) replacement, i.e., it is part of the FTOOLS system for the coming release. He had previously estimated that integrating ape (via HOOPS, I think) into the science tools would take a few weeks after ape was done).
Source Catalog
The catalog group has not met since June 21.